Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee

by Edward Lee

  "I only meant that it seemed strange when you said you'd never seen her before but you had, in the picture, and here she is at this party that you're also at but don't know who she is-"

  "Jesus Christ, what is it you think I'm lying about? People would come and go in this house the whole time I worked here. There might as well have been a fucking revolving door out front. I can't possibly remember every single woman that had the hots for Hildreth!"

  Karen was obviously pissed off now; Westmore felt foolish.

  "Let me look Jesus Christ. Let me see if I can remember every single chick to set foot in this fucking house-" Frowning, Karen leaned over, her bikini'd rump a few inches from Westmore's sight. She studied the screen. "Oh, wait a minute, I do remember her."

  "Was she one of the porn girls?"

  "No, she was one of Hildreth's gofers. He'd take one under his wing every now and then, called her his assistant. Almost never saw her, though, and she definitely wasn't a party girl. Never even saw her with a drink. And come to think of it- What was the name you just ran by me?"

  "Deborah Anne Rodenbaugh."

  "Okay, then that's probably her 'cos I think her name was Debbie. She drove a little black convertible."

  Yes! Westmore celebrated. "Then that's her. I finally know who the hell it is." Westmore had made a big deal about nothing, but at least he got the info he needed.

  "Why is she so important anyway?"

  Westmore scratched his head. "I don't know, but it's her car stashed in the woods. Knowing who she is is a start."

  "A mystery. Is that what Vivica really hired you for? To find out about this girl? Vivica's not the jealous type, believe me."

  Westmore did his best to skirt the question. "I'm just ... checking things out"

  "Yeah? Checking things out?" Karen put her hands on her hips, deliberately displaying her body to him.

  Holy Jesus. This place is gonna drive me honkers.

  "I'm going to go tan. You can finish checking things out." She gave him a last amused glance. "You're a real goofball, you know that?"

  "Bigtime. But that's what you like about me, right?"

  "I guess so," she chuckled and left.

  Chapter Ten

  I

  Westmore was never going to make a play for her. Willis was sexually terrified. Mack didn't like her. Nyvysk was gay. And Adrianne and Cathleen were looney toons. So why should Karen care what people might think?

  Co ahead, somebody. Call me a sleaze.

  She preferred to think of herself, instead, as uninhibited. It seemed natural and honest. If someone wants to peep on me, I don't care ... She popped off the tiny bikini and stood stark naked in the middle of the sunny inner court. The sun on her skin felt luxurious; it reminded her of why she loved Florida.

  She stretched back on a stone lounge chair topped with weatherproof cushions. The fountain had been turned off, a dry-mouthed gargoyle that seemed to leer at her. Beds of day-lilies, touch-me-nots, and milkwort bloomed various shades of orange. Karen could smell the sweet richness in the air. She closed her eyes behind the sunglasses and the world went from radiant to black.

  She tried to blank her mind but her thoughts kept turning to Westmore. He wasn't her type at all; perhaps that explained her attraction. After twenty years of sleeping with the wrong guys maybe she was starting to see the light. Somebody decent and smart might be nice for a change. But it doesn't matter 'cos he's not going for it, she thought. Yeah, he's smart, all right. Smart enough not to mess around with me...

  She tried but failed to resist the fantasy, imagining Westmore with her right now, right out here, both of them clothed in nothing but sunlight. His mouth was on hers, then began to lower. His hands were molding her flesh. The feel of his body on hers compounded the luxury of the sunlight enveloping her. Karen felt ecstatic ...

  When she drifted to sleep, Westmore came with her. His mouth was between her legs now, laving her. Karen's nerves felt like a network of springs about to snap at any moment.

  Then, something felt ... wrong.

  The tongue delving into her felt impossibly long: tubular meat extending. Was it forked? Karen's eyes bulged, and when she snapped them open, she wasn't in the courtyard. She lay on the bare stone floor of some dungeon-like cell, with orange firelight wavering in through smoking holes in the wall.

  Where am I? she thought, aghast.

  Through one of the broken holes in the wall she saw something in the distance, a temple of some sort, perched on a fog-seeping rise. It was flesh-colored. Arteries seemed to run up and down its front columns and side walls. But as the sensations deep in her loins began to intensify, her atten tions pulled away from the temple because that's when she noticed something else.

  It wasn't Westmore who tended to her below the waist, it was Jaz.

  Karen screamed. Jaz grinned, a grin full of fangs, as he retracted a veined, foot-long tongue that was black as a lizard's and very much forked. His forehead rippled, skin ruddy, with blood-red eyes. A pair of fat knurls protruded from the forehead, and the hands that gripped her thighs were clawed.

  "Mom! Help!"

  The plea was unmistakeable. It was Darlene, her daughter. Karen screamed doubly hard when her eyes found her: hanging upside-down and naked. Sheer horror flooded her young eyes.

  Three-Balls, horned and mutated as Jaz, stood beside Darlene with a sickle-shaped knife.

  "Hang her up beside her daughter," another voice commanded.

  It was Hildreth, standing alone in the cell's corner.

  The clawed hands that had been pushing Karen's knees back to her face now yanked her up by a fistful of hair. In this evil place, wherever it might be, her large breasts were even larger, her hips wider, her curves more extreme. The place, yes. It had re-formed her, but for what?

  The thing that was now Jar shoved her face toward another hole in the wall.

  "Take a good look, my dear," Hildreth's voice ground. "Take a look at yourself back in your world. Can you see? Can you see what the acolytes of Belarius are doing to you?"

  Karen saw.

  She saw herself back in the inner courtyard. She was being mauled on the lounge chair by what could only be described as gelatinous shadows. The things were gang-raping her, while a transposition of Hildreth stood aside and watched. He was here and there at the same time.

  "And you know what, Karen?" his image in the cell asked. "You're enjoying every moment of their efforts. Such is the nature of true, unadulterated lust."

  Karen watched in horror at what was being done to her, as the hand gripping her hair twisted tighter. Below, the gargoyle stooped in the center of the fountain was vomiting blood ...

  "It's lust that summons them. Why else would I choose such a house?"

  Karen couldn't cogitate anything he said. Her terror was burning through her. She screamed loud as a train whistle when, next, she was thrown to the floor and her ankles were lashed together by something like slimy rope, and she was hung upside-down on a hook next to her daughter.

  Hildreth smiled, a spoiled light in his eyes. "Mother and child. How appropriate a homage."

  Darlene was screaming first, a pitiable wail of violated innocence. Three-Balls was sawing into the meat of her neck with the curved knife. The bone-deep wound poured blood like water from a spigot, emptying into a trough which sat below them.

  "Don't worry, Karen," Hildreth assured. "This is only a dream that we've hijacked from you. It was your lust that let us in.

  Jaz was cutting into Karen's neck. Strangely she felt no pain, only the sensation of being emptied.

  "It's just a dream, just a dream. Please, Karen. Help me make my dreams come true."

  She twitched on the hook as her blood poured into the trough.

  "Good, good. Spill forth. It's so beautiful, isn't it?"

  When there was nothing left, their heads were cut off and tossed to the floor. Karen could still see, both her and her daughter's headless bodies hanging above. Jaz and Three-Balls were running their
hands down the bodies, from ankles to waist, then waist to neck, to squeeze out every drop.

  "Good," Hildreth said. "Now paint the walls with it."

  Hildreth carried both heads to a wooden table fitted with a hand-crank press. Karen could still see as her head was placed on the pressure plate and the device was wheeled down and down and down, until the skull collapsed and her brains were squeezed through her mouth, ears, and nose, and eventually crushed flat.

  II

  The girl was asleep in Clements' bed. The girt, he thought, frowning at himself. He knew her name now Connie. And he was even sort of falling for her. A crack-addict, a prostitute. He laughed at himself. He didn't care. He'd get her off that shit when this other thing was over. Clements was determined to see it all to an end, even if he had to end it himself. Then he'd get Connie into a long-term rehab, and didn't care how much he'd have to pay. He was either very sincere, or the biggest fool on earth.

  She'd helped him earlier at the mansion, with his cell phone on vibrate, watching with binoculars in case Vivica Hildreth dropped by at the house. She was the only one who knew Clements by sight and hence would know the man in the exterminator's uniform was really a commen- dated ex-cop.

  In the atrium, while pretending to spray for bugs, he'd taken the CD's out of the voice-activated digital recorder that he'd hidden under the couch nearest the center of the room, and replaced them with blank recordable CD's. He'd gotten the info on the Hildreth account from the guy who owned Bayside Pest Control. Clements had been the one who-with less than ethical means-had busted the cokedealer who'd hooked the owner's daughter. Favor time.

  Now all he had to do was listen to five CD's worth of voice-activated recordings. It was going to be a long night.

  Some major conversations took place by the time he got to the second disc. Nyvysk and the three psychics were all there now-a real batty bunch. Cosmic rapes, they'd talked about, as if it were real. Out-of-body experiences. They were convinced Hildreth was a true satanist and the house was "charged," whatever that meant. Clements knew they were coming in advance from the bug he'd gotten into Vivica Hildreth's penthouse. Two employees of Hildreth's were there now, too, and so was the writer.

  The weak link was the writer.

  But not a peep about Debbie Rodenbaugh.

  Yes, it was going to be a very long night. Mr. Johnny Walker Black was there to keep him company, and so was the Marlboro Man. Maybe, just maybe, one of these kooks knew about Debbie and what had really happened to her.

  The weak link was the writer, he thought again.

  Clements looked at the bio pic of journalist Richard Westmore. He tapped a finger against the photo.

  He's the one Igo for, Clements thought.

  It was much later that night when Clements heard one distorted voice which seemed to vacillate in and out, and seemed backed by the most distant shrieks-a voice that cackled and said: "Clements! Come into our midst and be one of us! We know you're listening ..."

  III

  Westmore felt sick to death.

  He sat paralyzed, watching the screen. Oh my dear God. What a sick, sick world ... How could people do things like this? What could compel the human will to engage in such perversion? How could people even be capable of this?

  Westmore could only devise one answer.

  It was evil. It had to be. It could be nothing else.

  Several of the DVD's toward the bottom of the pile weren't like the others. Not sex frolics with laughable plots and awful dialogue. These movies were not the fare one would find in an adult entertainment store.

  They were rape movies.

  And other things. Beatings. Sadism. Bestiality. The worst that humanity had to offer was right here for him to see, compliments of Mr. Reginald Hildreth. Men in masks were the male participants in these cases, and at least two of them were Hildreth's boys:Jaz and Three-Balls. Younger womenpresumably prostitutes or homeless women, street waifs-were being beaten and raped before the camera's cold eye. The women were either gagged, or allowed to scream outright. Often they were blindfolded, to steepen their horror. There were several DVD's like this, and they were all shot in locations that Westmore recognized-various rooms and parlors of the mansion.

  Another DVD was a genital piercing-or at least that's what Westmore thought it would be called. A half hour of footage that was one shot: A woman's splayed pubis. One piercing at a time, the woman's vaginal opening was closed by chrome rings stitching the lips together. The woman's face was never shown, nor was the rest of her body. The camera never moved.

  Westmore was dizzy by the end of it all. It took several minutes to compose himself, and when he thought he had himself back together, he got up to leave the office but found himself bolting for the bathroom where he spontaneously vomited.

  Then he walked back down through the dark house to the South Atrium, a long sightless stare in his eyes, like someone who'd just left the observation window of an execution.

  "You look like you've just seen a ghost," Cathleen said when he trudged in.

  "Maybe he has," Willis said.

  The group was all sitting around the conference table. "I wish I'd seen a ghost," Westmore said, seating himself. "I saw something a lot worse."

  "What are you talking about?" Adrianne asked.

  "I've just spent the last couple of hours watching more of the illustrious productions of T&T Entertainment. Rape movies.

  "T&T never did anything underground," Karen remarked. "It was all licensed and legal pornography."

  "This stuff wasn't. It was nauseating. Stuff that Hildreth made on the side, for kicks, I guess. I'm starting to finally see the real Hildreth. The guy was sick in the head." Westmore still felt dried out, abandoned by his own spirit. "Only the sickest sort of people in the world could find that stuff arousing. It was criminal."

  "Hildreth was a sick man," Nyvysk said. "There are a lot of Hildreths in the world. It's beyond sickness. They exist to perpetuate evil. Pornography, rape, degradation--those are the tools they use to solicit the devil."

  Westmore was still too nauseated to reject the theological inference. The images from the discs--the vacant faces and pale skin, the screams and the sounds of fists colliding into flesh-it haunted him at the table. He looked for any distraction ... and found one. Some sort of a large recording device-the size of a VCR-sat on the table. "What's that?"

  "We had a trespasser," Cathleen said, squeezing lemon into some iced-tea.

  "We're being bugged," Willis added.

  Westmore was flabbergasted. "What?"

  "That's a CD recorder with a voice activation switch," Nyvysk explained. "It's only on when someone's talking, so each disc can conceivably record everything said in this room for at least a day. I found it under the couch. It's hooked up to an RF transceiver that picks up all the sounds of the room through that microphone." He pointed up toward the crystal chandelier hanging above the table.

  A studied squint showed Westmore a tiny microphone stuck to the bottom of one of the lamp bulbs. "Who was bugging us?"

  Cathleen laughed. "Somebody you let in the house today."

  Westmore thought back. "The bug guy?"

  "The bug guy," Nyvysk said.

  "But he was legit ..."

  "If it's anybody's fault, it's mine," Karen admitted. "It wasn't the guy who usually comes out. I should've called the company to verify, but I didn't." She paused, to frown at herself. "I was hungover and I didn't feel like going to the trouble.

  Nyvysk walked to the TV. "It was sheer luck on my part. I was in the common room checking my own hookups, when I happened to notice this man walking around down here over the videocom. So I pushed the record button on the camera. This is what I saw him doing ..." The TV winked on, and there it was. "Mike" from Bayside Pest Control. On the screen he was spraying a line of pesticide along the molding, when he quickly set his tank down, glanced around, to kneel at the couch. He slid the recorder out, replaced some discs, then was back to spraying a minute later.
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br />   "How do you like that?" Westmore said, astonished. "Why's he bugging us?"

  "Maybe he works for Vivica," Adrianne posed.

  Mack scowled at the end of the table. "Why would Vivica bug her own house? I work for her, remember? So does Karen. If you psychic folks pulled anything funny, one of us would tell her in a heartbeat "

  "Then it's got to be the police," Cathleen asserted.

  "That doesn't make sense, either," Westmore said. "The police have closed the Hildreth case. It was a multiple homicide/suicide. Everybody's dead. So where's the case?" but even as he spoke the words he wondered, Maybe Vvica's not the only one who thinks her husband is still alive ...

  "It doesn't really matter who was bugging us, or why," Nyvysk said. "It is curious, though."

  "Curious?" Mack objected. "This is a little bit more than curious, I think. It's making me paranoid as shit."

  "Nobody's doing anything wrong here," Nyvysk reminded. "We're in the house by invitation of the owner. No crimes are being committed. To novices, we're just a bunch of crackpot ghost-hunters and mentalists. It would be illogical for the police to care, to even waste their time."

  "Maybe it's a newspaper," it occurred to Westmore. "That would sell some copies. 'Murder House Investigated by Famous Psychics."'

  Everybody looked at Westmore through a long silence. "I didn't even think of that," Nyvysk said. "And it's noteworthy that you're the one who suggested it. So tell us, Mr. Westmore, which newspaper is it you work for?"

  "Wait a minute!" Westmore hastened. "I don't work for any paper now I'm freelance"

  "Could be writing a freelance book," Cathleen added. "It would be a blockbuster!"

  My and my big mouth, Westmore thought.

  `But again, it scarcely matters as far as I'm concerned," Nyvysk said. "There's little need for Mr. Westmore to plant electronic bugs when he's already in our midst. And it wouldn't make sense to risk sneaking in an outsider to change discs when he could much more safely do it himself"

  "Thank you," Westmore said, relieved.

  Nvyvsk went on, "We mustn't let this bugging incident distract us from our purpose. Something far more grave happened today, and we need to talk about it."